The Misguided Fingerpointing of the Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage Documentary
If there is one major takeaway I had from watching the Woodstock 99’ HBO documentary, its that you cannot, repeat, cannot view certain events through modern-day lens. This disastrous weekend of music can be traced to one main factor, but this documentary, produced by Bill Simmons, has this undercurrent of wanting to shift the conversation towards an unnecessary direction. This documentary slyly points the finger towards the music and its performers, the culture, the demographic, when truthfully under better leadership and more attempts to actually replicate the music festival its named after we could have seen completely different results.
Before I start arguing against what the documentary’s hints of blame, let’s discuss the true primary culprit of the entire disaster that unfolded: the staff that organized the event.
Let’s take Magic Kingdom for example, whose capacity is about 90,000. Let’s pretend like on a Florida summeresque July 4th weekend the entire park is full, you have to walk from the parking lot all the way to the park itself, security is reduced to just a few, none of the bathrooms are working, access to free water is non-existent, bottled water is quadruple its usual price, no outside food is allowed, sewage has emerged from the ground to flow everywhere, and Disney for whatever reason had decided to remove most of the available seating and shade.
What do you think would happen?
Regardless of demographic, the place will burn to the ground, guaranteed. Cinderella Castle would be up in flames. But, because Disney is an organized machine that concentrates heavy on spacing and staffing, the entire history of all the Disney parks has been met with just one guest-created shutdown---even during the stormiest and hottest of Florida summers.
On the other side of the coin, because the people behind Woodstock 99 were absolute degenerates whose only focus was on profit and maintaining the image of control, created this disastrous scenario that was only getting worse and worse the more they were denying the dangers and violence and mess that had been occurring. In the middle of July, in the middle of a giant airstrip that’s caked in limited shade and intense asphalt they decided to separate the main stages by a mile and basically let everyone fend for themselves with limited resources.
I don’t care if every single band had been begging for riots, zero blame should go to the artists involved, and about 99% of the blame belongs to the organizers that were only focused on the dollar signs. The organizers created a series of horrifying circumstances that would reduce the venue into bonfires, riots, looting, and massive destruction. Truth be told, even with how many untold sexual assaults and debauchery behavior that had occurred, it could have been infinitely worse if the circumstances had gotten any worse. This documentary did a good job describing why it was a mess, but the film gets a little messy when it digs into some additional social commentary.
Executive Producer Bill Simmons is notoriously a grunge fan and a lover of the 1991-1995 rock era when Nirvana and Pearl Jam ruled all---and infamously hated the rock that followed up until the current century. The producers through interviews painted nu-metal as this slanted genre that exists because White America wanted to take something they considered too “Black” and make it their own. But here’s where the documentary muddles on facts: the extended history of nu-metal, whose origins began within the grunge era.
Rage Against the Machine made their debut in the early 90s, as did Korn---two bands who peaked after grunge slipped. This type of music had existed for years before Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit had hit the stratosphere with their 1998-2000 output. To add to that, many hip-hop and rap acts had been associated with the nu-metal scene, including Wu-Tang Clan, Eminem, Busta Rhymes, DMX (who DOMINATED his set on Woodstock), Snoop Dogg, among others. So this claim that White America wasn’t receptive of rap music until it became -angry and misogynistic- is quite the reach. I can’t believe I have to defend the Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit era, but nu-metal is most definitely not strictly white. Another note: the documentary prominently displayed flags of several other countries, including some Latin American ones like Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Linking the music that was popular and battling the pop bands on TRL with violent images of Woodstock 99, Columbine and Fight Club, even if they backtracked a little on the connections, was probably the most irresponsible move of the film----outside of showing several images of topless women and women being sexually assaulted on camera and yet having only one female concertgoer interviewed in the entire film. The genre of nu-metal, metal, goth rock, and other related genres took the worst of hits as the new century started because the media was directly blaming the music (Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Korn) for what happened in Columbine. This film definitely paints the music in a bad light---even though there were several acts calling out the groping and even pleading for better behavior, like Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Offspring, Korn, and yes, even at one point Limp Bizkit. Of course, if you are relying on Fred frakin’ Durst to help calm the mood of the crowd, you’re already losing the battle.
As a reminder, the violence that occurred within the venue and in the concerts is unacceptable, but this unspeakable evil was able to emerge because of extremely poor planning, cost-cutting, terrible vetting, and a complete lack of security, which was then combined with the brutal heat and a lineup of music that had many levels of escalating energy without much countering to mellow out the adrenaline. We don’t link gangster rap and hip-hop to 1990s gang violence that claimed many artists’ lives, so we also shouldn’t be linking nu-metal or heavy metal to the mass raping and assaulting and looting that happened.
We can definitely take another time to discuss the culture of White America and America in general as Y2K was approaching and we were on the tail end of a very successful Clinton administration that saw a strong economy, no inflation, mass surplus, and very minimal participation in global affairs and conflicts. We can discuss what White America was feeling, we can discuss how you can loosely connect the bottom-of-the-barrel concertgoers to the eventual 4chan/8chan atmosphere and eventual memeing Trump straight to the presidency----but the Woodstock 99 concert is not the place to do it, because nearly all the hostility and rioting (especially in the final night) could have been avoided if the event had any sort of structure and planning. With the third day looting and raiding of food that had still not been sold it was obvious that the people responsible were primarily bitter, broke, and sick of having no access to any of the basic amenities thanks to the extreme lengths to capitalize on the customers by the planning team.
If Woodstock 99’ allowed food and drinks, had not jacked up prices of water, took place in the fall when it gets colder, had the stages closer to each other, had a better system of keeping everyone entertained, had not enclosed the entire venue like a camp, had a more diverse lineup to mellow down the adrenaline of the harder acts, focused more on the actual “Woodstock” aspect of the weekend, would we have seen a fraction of the violent chaos that had occurred? Would we have seen this -white male rage- that the documentary focused on? More than likely not, so why does the film spends most of its energy on the MTV controversy angle, the white America nu-metal angle, and just other explanations I found irrelevant because quite literally everything was instigated by capitalist greed, heat, and the resulting anger from both.
To be quite frank, the documentary was detailed, had its interesting moments and interviews (Scott Stapp?!?!?!?) but very scatterbrained in its overall message.